moral underdetermination of relation

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

The moral underdetermination of relation is RB3’s warning that constitutive connection does not itself authorize ethical judgment. Relations can sustain care or organize capture, surveillance and domination. The proposal rejects relational density as a measure of goodness and preserves the need to evaluate what particular constraint patterns enable, foreclose and make revisable for differently vulnerable participants.

Explanation

The book’s mutual-aid and surveillance contrast is explicitly imagined. Both systems have dense coupling and feedback, while their patterns differently distribute trust, suspicion and opportunities for repair. The comparison is therefore an illustrative evaluative contrast, not a newly verified empirical finding about all aid networks or every surveillance technology.

The relevant question becomes selectivity rather than the mere presence of relations. Compossibility asks whether trajectories can continue without systematically foreclosing one another’s viability. The entry preserves that additional normative commitment instead of presenting the ethical test as a theorem automatically entailed by relational ontology.

RB2 likewise says relation does not guarantee the good, and PB explicitly leaves bindingness outside the formal model. These book-specific qualifications prevent a false synthesis in which more entanglement is always the answer. They also keep real boundaries, unequal power and the possibility of refusal visible within relational explanation.

Scope and attribution

Relation and density do not imply goodness; retain additional evaluation and the hypothetical status of the contrast.

AB — The Actual Book

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 124, 181, 183; Notes: 248.

PB — The Possible Book

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 34, 105.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 193, 194, 207.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

The developed account belongs to RB3 in the cited local scope, with antecedents and qualifications retained.

Occurrence locators: 212, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235, 244, 248, 321.